1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display (LCD) device and, more particularly, to an LCD device and a method of driving the same that can substantially prevent variations in brightness of an LCD panel by gradually increasing the level of a gate-on voltage.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A liquid crystal display (LCD) device displays an image by applying an electric field to a liquid crystal material having dielectric anisotropy injected between two substrates and by controlling the intensity of the electric field to control the amount of light transmitted through the liquid crystal material.
The LCD device may be classified into an active matrix type and a passive matrix type according to driving methods. An LCD device using a thin film transistor (TFT) of the active matrix type is widely used. The TFT may be formed of amorphous silicon or polysilicon. The TFT using polysilicon has low power consumption and low manufacturing costs; however, the manufacturing process is complicated. The TFT using amorphous silicon, having a less complicated manufacturing process, is widely used as an LCD element for a large screen LCD. Moreover, a gate driving circuit may be integrated into an LCD panel using the amorphous silicon TFTs. In this case, the gate driving circuit is provided on the LCD panel and thereby a separate driving integrated circuit is not required.
When such an amorphous silicon gate (ASG) is used, variations in brightness occur between the top and bottom of the panel as the panel size increases due to a gate-on voltage being lower towards the bottom of the panel. Therefore, voltages applied to pixels vary according to the position of the panel, even though the same data voltage is applied.